The Political Foundations of the Ecology of Human Rights International NGOs

Over the past two centuries human rights international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have not only proliferated around the globe, but also contributed to promoting and protecting human rights at the international and domestic levels. Although the literature has demonstrated the significant role of human rights INGOs for social change and global governance, little systematic attention has been paid to why patterns of human rights INGOs’ organizational founding and population growth have developed in the modern world system the way they did. This paper seeks to fill this important void in International Relations by examining the determinants of human rights INGO founding during the post-Congress of Vienna period from 1817 to 2009 through a mixed-methods research design. Drawing from insights from field theories in sociology and political science, it advances the politico-institutionalist argument that the hegemonic United States, other sovereign states, and their intergovernmental arrangements have created incentives for human rights INGO founding. The argument receives strong support from Bayesian data analysis while accounting for alternative explanations that emphasize the organizational form’s legitimacy, resource competition, globalization, and other factors, as well as from process-tracing studies of select human rights INGOs in history.